An Ontology-based Approach for the Co-Development and Optimization of Aircraft Cabin Design and Assembly Architectures

Kurzfassung

The aircraft cabin is a highly dynamic environment due to its customizable nature, its short life cycle, its numerous interfaces to aircraft systems, and the continuous integration of new technologies. This impacts the common influence of cabin design and assembly which is highlighted by current industry requirements and applications, such as the need for modularization, system integration and accessibility during installation, or reconfiguration for customized cabin designs and adaptable assembly resources. Therefore, the co-development of cabin designs and assembly planning must be enabled so that both can be assessed and optimized simultaneously. Current methods for the integration of design and assembly focus on abstract business and cost-oriented assessments or consider integration stages where detailed data, such as CAD, CAE, or CAM, already exist. However, there is still a lack of approaches at the conceptual stage that support the technical co-development and optimization of design and assembly. Moreover, there is a need for an automated interpretation of dependencies and interactions between the cabin design and the assembly planning to support the generation of architectural choices for trade-off analyses. This work aims to provide a methodology that integrates conceptual architecture and knowledge models from cabin design and assembly planning to address current research needs. For this purpose, concepts of Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) are leveraged, and reusable modeling elements are defined. These depict abstract artifacts of the cabin products and assembly system. The concepts of the two lifecycle stages are semantically mapped and integrated into a consistent Knowledge-Graph (KG). The KG underlies a pre-defined ontology model that links and constrains design and assembly concepts. A specific focus is set on the interfaces between the parts, considering these elements as an intersection point between the product architecture, the emerging assembly processes, as well as the required capabilities and skills of the assembly resources. Furthermore, a generic approach to inferring and translating integrated information from the KG into an architectural design space is developed. This allows for the computation of architecture optimization based on cabin Product-Process-Resources (PPR) variants. It makes it possible to simultaneously plan the assembly processes, allocate the tasks to the resources and enable product architecture trade-offs. This approach supports technical decision-making at an early developmental stage and ensures that traceable, abstract architecture foundlings are available for subsequent detailed analyses.